Nearly 20 Pop-Ups in Half a Minute: How Chinese Apps Ambush Older Users

The visitor had come to Huangshan, in Anhui province, to see the fish lanterns — a traditional lantern craft enjoying a social-media revival. He opened the camera on his smartphone to film the performance, and within half a minute the screen had thrown nearly twenty pop-up advertisements and redirects at him. He put the phone away and gave up. The case reached Baidu's trending board, and then CCTV.

The state broadcaster's legal-affairs programme spent Monday night cataloguing the pattern, and it is precision work. An older man's dial pad is covered by an ad as he tries to make a call. A home-security camera view is blocked by pop-ups five times in a row. Inside WeChat, an ad disguised as an incoming call — complete with ringtone — refuses to close. Earlier this month, at a bus station in Jishou, Hunan, a man in his sixties or seventies tried and failed to get past a cascade of ads to message his family; all he knew to do was lock and unlock the screen, over and over. The bystander who filmed him told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald that the point was never the phone brand: it was the ads.

The mechanism, per the report: developers deliberately shrink the close button, or set a fake "X," to farm accidental clicks — a direct violation of the advertising law's requirement that an ad close with one tap. Experts on the programme drew the line this way: "elder mode" and apps certified for older users should carry no pop-ups at all, and designs that are formally closable but practically unclickable may still count as interfering with normal use — which makes them actionable.

Chinese internet culture long ago gave this a name: "digital psoriasis" — the same word used for the small ads plastered on lift doors and lamp posts, for anything that cannot be scraped off. The stakes are higher than irritation. Payments, hospital registrations, government services and the family group chat all run through the phone; for older Chinese the smartphone is the front door, and adware is what jams it. The industry harvests older users' clicks precisely because they click.

Regulators have run clean-up campaigns on pop-ups before, and the ads return with the next app update. The advertising law already says every close button must work; the Huangshan video is evidence of how far practice has drifted from the text, and CCTV's framing — older users "hunted with precision" — is the sound of the next campaign being scheduled.